Art teacher, author and curator of the Watts Museum near Guildford. Blunt was born to Arthur Stanley Vaughan Blunt (1870–1929), an
Anglican minister and Hilda Master (Blunt) (1880–1969). His father was the
chaplain to the British Embassy in Paris. As his younger brothers did,
Blunt received a scholarship to Marlborough College where he studied between
1914 and 1920. Blunt's conservative views toward modern art were already in
place. When Roger Fry mounted the first post-impressionist show at
the Grafton Galleries in London in 1910, Blunt wrote of the paintings by Manet
and Cézanne that they were "works of idleness and impotent stupidity, a
pornographic show." After a year at Worcester College, Oxford,
he switched to the Atelier Moderne in Paris to become an artist. By the
following year he was an engraving student at the Royal College of Art,
London where he received an associates degree in 1923. At the College, he was
befriended by Sir William Rothenstein. Blunt joined Haileybury
College, Hertfordshire, as its art instructor (art master) in 1923. He
spent the year 1933 on leave training as a concert singer in Italy and Germany,
but pursued singing only avocationally. Europe broadened his cultural outlook
enough that returning to a provincial boys school was not longer rewarding.
Blunt researched and published on the architect William Wilkins (1778–1865), who
had designed the buildings of Haileybury in 1806, publishing his Haileybury
Buildings privately in 1938. The previous year, a family connection
got him a position of second drawing master at Eton College. By this time, 1937,
Blunt was opening up about his homosexuality. In 1950 Blunt wrote his most
acclaimed book, The Art of Botanical Illustration together with the botonist William T.
Stearn (1911-2001), for which he was awarded the Veitch Gold Medal from the Royal
Horticultural Society. Stearn became one of Blunt's close friends.
At Eton Blunt encouraged italic handwriting, publishing the book Sweet Roman Hand
on the subject in 1952. Blunt retired from Eton in 1959 and joined the Watts
Gallery (Museum) in Compton, near Guildford, Surrey as a curator. Blunt took up
writing, largely biographies, as a past time. Among his art-related
biographies were The Dream King, of Ludwig II of Bavaria, (1970).
Stearn and Blunt further collaborated on Captain Cook's Florilegium
(1973) and The Australian Flower Paintings of Ferdinand Bauer (1976).
In 1976 he published Splendours of Islam, an art travelogue. When
Blunt retired from the Gallery in 1983, he was allowed to live in the curator's
house until his death. He died of cancer four years later. His brothers were
Christopher Evelyn Blunt (1904-1987), a noted numismatist, and Anthony Blunt
the eminent art historian (and spy).